COMPUTER COWBOYS

Julie Bennett. Special to the TribuneCHICAGO TRIBUNE

In the past nine years Torrance Mohammed, 28, has had 23 jobs. But Mohammed isn't fickle; he's a highly paid computer contractor.

Mohammed is part of a growing cadre of computer cowboys--men and women who take short term technical assignments and, when the work is done, move on. Since dropping out of college for financial reasons in 1991, he has worked in United Nations headquarters, on Wall Street, and in so many companies he has to consult his resume to identify them. Right now, he's the MIS manager at Los Angeles County's University of Southern California Medical Center. In two months, he has no idea where he'll be.

"If I'd worked for the same company all those years," Mohammed said, "I'd have seen the same technology over and over again. This way, I'm building different skill sets while earning a lot more money than a permanent employee."

The field is still so new that it's impossible to know just how many people have opted to become itinerant computer contractors. There is no mystery, however, about the demand for such workers. Right now, dice.com, one of the favorite sites used by contractors, lists 175,000 high-tech jobs, and Jerry Erickson, publisher of Contract Employment Weekly, says his site, Contract Job Hunter (cjhunter.com) is getting 50,000 to 75,000 hits a day.

The market for temporary computer workers evolved when companies discovered it was too expensive to hire employees on their own for special projects. To meet that short-term demand, traditional temporary staffing companies, such as Manpower Inc., added technical services divisions, while new companies, with names like Tech World and Volt, were formed to lease technical workers on an as-needed basis. Most of the new computer cowboys, like Mohammed, rely on these temporary staffing agencies to find their assignments. The 250 staffing agencies who are members of the National Technical Services Association in Alexandria, Va., for example, have 300,000 technical workers on assignment at any one time. The field also contains thousands of independent contractors who find jobs on their own.

The technical services organization estimates that the computer contractors who work through staffing agencies earn base salaries that are 110 percent to 125 percent higher than permanent workers doing the same job. That sum gets sweeter. "If you have a permanent job, you're locked into a salary no matter how many hours you work each day," Mohammed said. "But in IT fields, the majority of the work is done in the evening, after the other workers have left and the servers can go down. A contractor paid by the hour gets time and a half for all that overtime."

While on the job, the contractor is an employee of the temporary staffing company, who pays his salary and, in this competitive environment, provides benefits that may include medical, dental and vision insurance, 401(k) and stock purchase plans and even paid vacations. Beth Helton, a recruiter for Manpower Professional Services in Itasca, reports that pay rates from her office range from $16 to $20 an hour for a PC tech to $125 or $150 an hour for high-end people, "and we need more high-end IT and telecommunications people right now." At Manpower, contract assignments can last anywhere from one day to two years, Helton said.

Technical services firm CDI goes even further by picking up a desirable contractor's salary during "bench time," the time between assignments, said Erik Schmidt, a recruiter in CDI's Schaumburg office. But Jason Spock, 26, says he and the other CDI contractors he knows have yet to receive bench-time pay because once they finish an assignment, the agency always has another one waiting.

Independent computer contractors, who take assignments directly from a company, can earn even more money than contractors placed through agencies, said Stan Stinson, of Tallahassee, Fla., but they have to find jobs on their own. "I'm never concerned about doing the work," said Stinson, "but I'm always wondering, `What's going to be my next contract?' "

Computer programmer David Corcoran, 47, of Port Orchard, Wash., said he doubled his salary within one-and-a-half years of moving from a permanent job into computer contracting. He said he likes clients who will hire him directly, but sometimes a company will have a long billing cycle and he has to wait up to 60 days to get paid. Regular payment is important to Corcoran, who has a wife and seven children to support. "Last winter I had a six-week gap between assignments. Fortunately, my last position had paid very well, so we had a pile of money to live off," said Corcoran.

Job uncertainty may be the biggest disadvantage to being a computer contractor, but travel is a close second. You have to go where the jobs are, said Stinson. For the past nine months Stinson's been working on a major software installation for a bank in Columbus, Ohio, and flying home to Florida on weekends to see his wife and children.

Mohammed, who used Manpower to find most of his 23 jobs, says a relationship with a staffing agency "gives a contractor a broader range of support, like a family. If I have a technical problem, I can call other Manpower colleagues for help." Such relationships are especially valuable, he said, "because when you're a contractor, the client company tends to treat you with less regard than they have for their permanent employees. You're getting paid hourly and you can do the grunt work. Usually, you can't even attend company parties." But on the bright side, he added, contractors don't have to deal with company politics either.

Although computer contractors are well paid for their technical skills, it's their personalities that make them successful.

"You have to be able to promote yourself and show confidence in your ability," said Mohammed. You also need good communication skills, added Stinson, and you have to be able to work with many different types of people.